Dark times in the farmyard

I almost want to apologize for this. Almost. But not quite. I have a love for old recordings that borders on the obsessive, so much so that I wrote a whole novel around it (Bus People! You can read the whole thing here. Just click on the pink link.)

Bus People: quick links to parts 1 - 12

But never mind that. Now that I have YouTube, I don't have to wait for these bizarre old things to come on the radio or appear on a recording. NO! Here they are, millions of them, thick with dust and outmoded thinking, things you never wanted to hear but are going to hear anyway. 

The first two are - strange - novelty recordings, I guess, with a lot of barnyard stuff on them. But partway through the Farmyard Medley is a shock so unexpected that it literally registered in my gut. You'll know when you get to it.

That leads to the third recording. It's the same song I heard on an old record - so old it had grooves on only one side, and was about 1/2" thick - which I listened to with my friend Nancy, one day in the musty attic when it was raining too hard to do anything else. We found a trove of ancient records that probably hadn't been played since the 1920s, and some of them were far older than that. Cornfield Medley is shocking because of the language, and in particular the casual use of one of the worst words that exists, but the version we heard was even uglier because it involved a "Massa" ordering his slaves around.

Old and horrible, but how far have we come? Things are dark, these days, and the only way around it is to keep going. We're still fighting battles around ugly words, even uglier racism, the ruthlessness of it, the way it diminishes humanity. Back then, it was simply called entertainment.

(Never mind what's on this one. I don't know myself. But there IS a connection to Bus People, in that nobody is quite sure who this is.)

Scare-the-shit-out-of-you time!

Way Down Yonder in The Cornfield by The Brilliant Quartet (1891)

I discovered another version of this rather awful song, very close to the one I remember from my wayward youth, but I just couldn't post it, I couldn't. This one has the same flavor, with the advantage that you can't understand the words.

Flintstone records

You know those ol' guys (though I guess maybe some of them are girls, and I guess maybe some of them are me) who go on and on about the good ol' days when album covers were really album covers, an art form, like Tommy and Sergeant Pepper and Led Zeppelin all that, and not reduced down into teeny squares something like a postage stamp?

This isn't really about that, but close. I think these recordings came in brown paper sleeves or something. I saw one once: it was called A Cornfield Medley, by the Haydn Quartet (nothing to do with the composer: this was a male barbershop-type group who did "minstrel" songs. These songs also had a really evil name, like an animal with a mask and striped tail, but it's so bad I can't say it.)

This old record, barely audible for all the surface racket, was blatantly racist, but fascinating. It only lasted about a minute and a half. I'm not sure if the label on it was this primitive, but the record itself seemed to be made out of slate from the Cretaceous period. It was heavy, man. Heavy. The grooves were wide apart and it was only recorded on one side, because it literally had not occurred to anyone up to this point to record on both sides.

The only alternative to these slabs of slate were cylinders. Cylinders were made of wax and very delicate, unlike the Flintstone discs that were sturdy (unless you dropped them), if barely audible. There was always a loud announcement of the song title and artist at the beginning of the cylinder, because there was no way to mark the information on them.

But these! These things! Paper labels wouldn't stick to them because glue was made out of old horsehides, so someone got the idea of etching the title information right into the slate or slag or whatever they were made of (my sources say hard rubber, but it's hard to believe it wasn't igneous rock).

I wish I had one of them in my hands right now so I could weigh it in my hands and smell it and play it on my gramophone (which I don't have) and enter that spooky time machine. Lots of collectors have put their prized recordings on YouTube, which is something, so I'll look for them. I've found the Cornfield Medley on two other sites, but for some reason most of the horrible language has been taken out.